The theory of consciousness represented by the Consciousness is Representational and Real <http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6> camp continues to extend its lead in the amount of scientific consensus it has for being the best theory of consciousness at canonizer.com.

Leading scientists such as Steven Lehar, John Smythies, and others have recently joined and are now helping to further develop these camps.

Other theories have been started, but so far no theories have been able to generate anything close to the amount of consensus, support and POV sub structure this representational and real camp has achieved.

Our continuing goal is to survey what everyone believes, develop concise descriptions of all good theories of consciousness and rigorously measure how much scientific consensus there is amongst experts <http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/53/11> for each.

Canonizer.com is not meant to measure truth, but only to collaboratively develop concise descriptions of the best theories. It is to rigorously measure and track what everyone, especially the experts, currently think is the best theory going forward as ever better arguments and scientific data continue to come in. We look forward to the day when the demonstrable scientific proof converts us all to accept the same set of theories and believe this scientific revolution has already started.

iambinary wrote @ 7/17/2009 12:47:00 AM:
huh.. how is that the best..........

No one is claiming that it IS the best. Just that more experts explicitly declared they think it is the best than any other theory, so far.

Obviously things are just getting started, and things could change as the survey becomes more comprehensive. But, so far, the more experts participate, the more this particular camp extends it's lead over all other theories in the amount of consensus / support it has.

If you think some other theory is better, or if you think this theory isn't the best, everyone would love to get your beliefs 'canonized' so to speak, so they are included in the survey for all to know concisely and quantitatively, just how many experts would agree with you.

If I understand this theory, they are saying that consciousness is entirely dependent upon perception. According to this theory a human being who has never experienced any perception of any kind would not have any consciousness, true?

brent.allsop

posted 12/10/2009 02:30

sen5241b wrote @ 12/10/2009 1:45:00 AM:
If I understand this theory, they are saying that consciousness is entirely dependent upon perception. According to this theory a human being who has never experienced any perception of any kind would not have any consciousness, true?

No, It is just that we believe so many people get perception completely wrong, and that proper understanding of perception is of fundamental importance. So we focus on that.

There is of course much more to consciousness, but once you understand perception correctly, the rest makes much more sense and seems obvious - with no conundrums.

Sounds like you think differently about consciousness? I'd love to know more.

Brent Allsop

tkorrovi

posted 12/10/2009 11:39

As i have said in the Artificial Consciousness forum, this voting in canonizer was not made in a neutral enough way, for it to be neutral, all proposals should be equal and it must be possible to vote them separately.

brent.allsop

posted 12/10/2009 18:27

tkorrovi wrote @ 12/10/2009 11:39:00 AM:
As i have said in the Artificial Consciousness forum, this voting in canonizer was not made in a neutral enough way, for it to be neutral, all proposals should be equal and it must be possible to vote them separately.

Hi tkorrovi,

I don't know what you mean by "was not made in a neutral enough way" because everything in the canonizer is perfectly open equal and neutral. All players and camps have the same equal opportunity as everyone.

You said: "it must be possible to vote them separately." and it is possible to do this. If there is no camp that does not have anything you disagree with, you can create a new top level camp or camp structure. The most well accepted camp / structure will get more support, all in a perfectly open, equal, and fair way.

Or, if there is some doctrine that does not easily fit an existing structure (i.e the supporters / detractors of the idea are scattered across existing structures somewhat randomly, that doctrine can be split out on its own. An example of this is the question of whether software can produce qualia. So rather than try to integrate this idea into the existing camp structure, an entirely new topic was created here where people could 'vote' on it separately:

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/83

But these types of things are the exception, and where possible, it is much better if things can be unified and simplified into single topics and camps. When things are much more concise and simple, it is much better for the reader. The reader can't read 10000 individual description of what 10000 people believe. As much as possible, it must be unified and quantified where things are similar.

And if you can think of any better way to do any of this, we are always open to any possibility. What is the problem you are seeing? I'm sure we can find a powerful and concise way to solve it for you and everyone, especially the reader. If you could do things any way you wanted, how would you do it?

Thanks

Brent Allsop

tkorrovi

posted 12/11/2009 00:36

I don't know to what hierarchies you want to organize the ideas, these are quite arbitrary and there even cannot be a single right one, as the world is a system, and not hierarchy. This hierarchy itself somewhat influences the voters, as it seems right to be part of some greater hierarchy, but this is not the biggest problem yet. Most importantly, the votes given to lowel level ideas must not be added to the ideas higher in the hierarchy. No matter where an idea is in that hierarchy, it is an idea like all others, and it must be voted as it is, separately from all others, and exactly the same way as all others.

brent.allsop

posted 12/11/2009 01:03

tkorrovi wrote @ 12/11/2009 12:36:00 AM:
I don't know to what hierarchies you want to organize the ideas, these are quite arbitrary and there even cannot be a single right one, as the world is a system, and not hierarchy. This hierarchy itself somewhat influences the voters, as it seems right to be part of some greater hierarchy, but this is not the biggest problem yet. Most importantly, the votes given to lowel level ideas must not be added to the ideas higher in the hierarchy. No matter where an idea is in that hierarchy, it is an idea like all others, and it must be voted as it is, separately from all others, and exactly the same way as all others.

There is nothing arbitrary about it. In the opinion of the people that created the hierarchy, at the time it was created, this was the best way to represent what everyone believes.

If you think there is a better way to organize it, you can propose a new structure in the camp forums to see how many people agree with you. If most or all do agree with you, you can easily re-org to improve things - that's the way things improve.

If there is a camp that is close to what you believe in, except for possibly one doctrine, you can offer to join that camp, if they'll move the particular offending doctrine to a lower camp where you don't have to support it. In most cases, people are always willing to do just about anything to win you into their camp.

Brent Allsop

tkorrovi

posted 12/11/2009 09:13

brent.allsop wrote @ 12/11/2009 1:03:00 AM:
...this was the best way to represent what everyone believes.

Yep, i am not there and will not be, because if i was, i did agree with that that the process is democratic, but it is rather arbitrary and gives some group op people many possibilities to affect the opinions of others. In a way which has nothing to do with the voted ideas.

brent.allsop

posted 12/11/2009 17:48

tkorrovi wrote @ 12/11/2009 9:13:00 AM:
Yep, i am not there and will not be, because if i was, i did agree with that that the process is democratic, but it is rather arbitrary and gives some group op people many possibilities to affect the opinions of others. In a way which has nothing to do with the voted ideas.

Yes, early arrivals to the party do have a bit of an advantage - that organizing things the way they want takes less effort. However, progress is always possible, and will always happen. And people's beliefs are more often than not, based on rational real evidence and logic, not what others believe. Even if you are late to the party, it has no bearing on whether you will be in the right camp before others or not. Change will always happen in the right direction, it just takes a bit longer, and a bit more effort when more people are already involved and still mistaken.

Ultimately, science will prove which theory is THE ONE, and everyone will abandon all other falsified camps, for that ONE that is most correct - something I believe is about to happen, and that this, the discovery of the how where what and why of the mind will be the greatest and most world changing scientific discovery of all time.

The current 'scientific consensus' as measured at canonizer.com is predicting this discovery will be based on 'effing' the ineffable. But of course this theory could also be falsified, like all others.

Upward,

Brent Allsop

DaveAlex

posted 3/22/2010 15:27

brent.allsop wrote @ 7/5/2009 11:19:00 PM:

The theory of consciousness represented by the Consciousness is Representational and Real <http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6> camp continues to extend its lead in the amount of scientific consensus it has for being the best theory of consciousness at canonizer.com.

Leading scientists such as Steven Lehar, John Smythies, and others have recently joined and are now helping to further develop these camps.

Other theories have been started, but so far no theories have been able to generate anything close to the amount of consensus, support and POV sub structure this representational and real camp has achieved.

Our continuing goal is to survey what everyone believes, develop concise descriptions of all good theories of consciousness and rigorously measure how much scientific consensus there is amongst experts <http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/53/11> for each.

Canonizer.com is not meant to measure truth, but only to collaboratively develop concise descriptions of the best theories. It is to rigorously measure and track what everyone, especially the experts, currently think is the best theory going forward as ever better arguments and scientific data continue to come in. We look forward to the day when the demonstrable scientific proof converts us all to accept the same set of theories and believe this scientific revolution has already started.

As always, we would love to know and discuss what everyone thinks.

Brent Allsop
http://canonizer.com

Two months agoI started studying AI seriously, although I have been thinking about it, off and on, for about 30 years. I did so because I was reading both Steven Pinker's book, "The Language Instinct" and Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind." On my shelf are Dennet's "Conciousness Explained" and Chris Nun's "De La Mettrie's Ghost; the Story of Decisions"

Penrose posits that only quantum physics can explain consciousness, while Pinker disagreed, but they got me thinking. I started reading Dennet but he seemed to be making mountains our of molehills. (I read him several years ago, before I really got interested in the subject. I need to revisit him) I plan to look at Canonizer as soon as i finish this post.

To me the problem of consciousness seems relatively simple, but the fact that it seems to be a great concern leads me to believe that I am missing what most AI people mean by it. Below I have sketched what I believe would comprise a conscious computer. I would appreciate it if someone would tell me it this is inadequate and if so, why.
---------
My initial idea was that consciousness could be achieved fairly easy by normal software and hardware. It would be possible to program a computer that would be aware of itselt (it's internal status), aware that it was an entity, aware that it was dealing with users, each of whom had different personalities (identities, interests, needs, etc.

My initial thought on how to program this such a consciousness goes like this. Consder a cluster of computers ala Minsky's "Society of Mind" with one acting as the central overseer (IAM). Others (modules) would handle speech-to-text, text-analysis, knowledge storage and retrieval, knowledge-to-text, text-to-speech, vision (several modules that would handle face recognition, gesture recognition, space recognition); these are pretty much self-explanatory. Additionally, there would be a computer that would keep track of the personal characteristics of the users, by maintaining personality profiles of each user. These profile would change during each session, and the changes would be stored so that they could be retrieved in the course of a conversation. "Yesterday, you were feeling depressed. Are you happier today?"

IAM would contain the consciousness; it would be aware of the various modules and periodically poll them to make sure that they were functioning and had sufficient resources (Hard drive space and memory). It would allot tasks to each module depending on the course of a conversation with a user. In dealing with a user, it would atemp to answer questions using the knowledge base. It would store new knowledge told by the user. It would store the conversations of each user for some fixed period of time so that it would "know" what was discussed in previous conversations. If a user said "What is an apple?" IAM could scan previous conversations and if appropriate, say "I told you two weeks ago what an apple was." (past conversations would be indexed.)

Now this scheme appears to be achievable, although admittedly there may be problems implementing some of the details that I have glossed over. The biggest is text-to-knowledge (converting plain text into information that was compatible with one of the knowledge bases). (One of the main tennents of linguistics is that the "Word in the text is not the same as the concept in the brain!)

brent.allsop

posted 3/22/2010 16:04

Hi Dave,

I agree with most everything you say here, especially about the difficulty of things like text to knowledge - and I agree that such is not impossible.

However, I am in the camp that predicts you are missing one critical part about consciousness, and that is qualia or phenomenal properties. The systems you are describing use abstract ones and zeros to represent information with. By design, what these ones and zeroes are represented with does not matter, as long as you properly interpret the particular physical representation.

We, on the other hand, use things like red vs green, instead of one vs zero, to represent our knowledge. What these are like, how they are different, and how it is all unified together, is the most important part. You can model each with the other, but when you ask something like: "What is red like for you?" At best, one will simply have to lie, as it will not really know what red is like, and will only be able to model the behavior of such, with something that is much more complex than it's referent. (It's always harder to lie, that to simply know and tell the truth.)

Oh, and by the way, this camp, that was described above, which I am in - the experts have recently selected a much better name for the theory: "Representational Qualia Theory". And it continues to extend its lead in the amount of experts supporting and collaboratively developing it. We're predicting no other theory will ever be able to achieve the same amount of consensus that this one will maintain, going forward, and that ultimately, it will be demonstrated to be THE ONE true theory, when all other theories are falsified by effing science.

Keep up the good work! This is a very exciting field, surely the field of science most likely to produce the next greatest and most world changing scientific discovery of all time. And we could certainly use your help with the consciousness survey project at canonizer.com - there are still a lot of popular theories out there that aren't yet adequately represented.

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/105

Upward,

Brent Allsop

Figlio03

posted 3/23/2010 04:04

well conciousness is that part of intelligence what do make decisions looking back to past history, present world and analyzing statistical data of frequent variation of actions. An intelligent machines should be able to solve a new problem, which have never been dreamed for, only if it owns its own concious part as all human beings do own in different heights. and how do you think this theory for machine conciousness do satisfy the above condition of being machine an intelligent????

brent.allsop

posted 3/23/2010 17:38

Hi Figlio03,

You said: "how do you think this theory for machine consciousness do satisfy the above condition of being machine and intelligent????"

I believe regular old abstract machines, that use ones and zeroes will eventually be able to model all intelligent behavior. However this will be very inefficient, and nothing like what real consciousness 'is like'. (It's hard to act as if you know what red is like, when you really don't know.)

The property dualism theory (the current expert scientific consensus see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/7 ) predicts we will discover these ineffable phenomenal properties of matter, and how to unify them into awareness spaces of conscious knowledge (including unification of other epistemological or meaning knowledge - like names of objects..)

And with this effing of the ineffable development, we will be able to make intelligent machines much more efficiently than simply using isolated ones and zeros that all need to be properly interpreted to know what they are like and what they mean.

In other words, there will be phenomenal machines, and indeed - the theory predicts we are phenomenally intelligent machines - that are about to scientifically achieve a significant phenomenally expanding and sharing upgrade.

The theory predicts our world, along with intelligence, humanity..., is about to become unrecognizably different and a much more phenomenally shared place. Our entire world is about to finally spiritually 'wake up'.

Brent Allsop

nicku

posted 4/27/2010 19:39

Brent, could i ask to what extent have the canonizer group recognised the pivotal facts that consciousness is purely and exclusively composed of sense data and also that qualia cannot usefully be approached from a subjective, 'what it is like to be a bat', type way, but from a reductionist distance.

I see a two phase split between the time when philosophy of mind theorists believed mistakenly that qualia events are as we see them as users and then maybe soon, the revolution in POM, when theories start to take on board that all subjective awareness is just a physically realised means of getting a human to be able to act in a self/other mode. This 'belief in self awareness' is a mechanistic functional component. No one or thing does the believing, the machine only needs to act as if it did, that is consciousness. Everything else is just recollection and processing of sensory data. We are just machines which have evolved a social module, which defines 'unit a and not unit a', thus allowing social action and interaction. Qualia may be defined as detected, stored and reprocessed sensory information in a computational unit.
How many of the theories are beginning to realise that we have no concrete thing such as consciousness?
cheers, Nick.

brent.allsop

posted 4/27/2010 22:12

Hi Nick,

Very good questions. From what I hear you saying, it sounds like you are still in Dennett’s elimitivist or reductionist camp that basically still believes there is no concrete thing like qualia, it just seemes like there is.

What do you mean when you talk about a “revolution in POM”?

Before we started the Consciousness Survey Project at canonizer.com, I expected to find many more experts that still think as you do, and that there would be some good rational arguments to support this position. There is this functionalist camp finally getting started:

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/37

but so far there are no good arguments for this position and not a lot of expert support especially in comparison to how much expert support there is for the leading “Representational Qualia Theory”.

Computers have sense data that are represented with ones and zeros. By design, what these are represented with does not matter, as long as you properly interpret whatever is doing the representation. Our conscious sense data, on the other hand, is very different. It is represented with things like red and green. By design, what these are represented with, what they are phenomenally like, how they are different, and the fact that the system is aware of this ineffable information is all important.

And as soon as we starting effing the ineffable (as in “oh THAT is what red is like for you”.) your theory will be obviously falsified and everyone will be forced to join some better effingly demonstrable to be true theory.

You can’t get much more ‘concrete’ than effing such so that everyone that still thinks the way you do finally accepts their theory has been falsified and jumps camps to THE ONE true theory. The evidence so far seems to indicate we have already achieved this scientific revolution / consensus, at least for most educational and rational experts.

If you still think otherwise, it would be great to really know what the best arguments for why one might want to think this way, and to know just how many people really do still agree with you. Evidently, so far, there are a lot more experts that disagree with you, for very convincing reasons.

Very good questions. From what I hear you saying, it sounds like you are still in Dennett’s elimitivist or reductionist camp that basically still believes there is no concrete thing like qualia, it just seemes like there is.

What do you mean when you talk about a “revolution in POM”?

Before we started the Consciousness Survey Project at canonizer.com, I expected to find many more experts that still think as you do, and that there would be some good rational arguments to support this position. There is this functionalist camp finally getting started:

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/37

but so far there are no good arguments for this position and not a lot of expert support especially in comparison to how much expert support there is for the leading “Representational Qualia Theory”.

Computers have sense data that are represented with ones and zeros. By design, what these are represented with does not matter, as long as you properly interpret whatever is doing the representation. Our conscious sense data, on the other hand, is very different. It is represented with things like red and green. By design, what these are represented with, what they are phenomenally like, how they are different, and the fact that the system is aware of this ineffable information is all important.

And as soon as we starting effing the ineffable (as in “oh THAT is what red is like for you”.) your theory will be obviously falsified and everyone will be forced to join some better effingly demonstrable to be true theory.

You can’t get much more ‘concrete’ than effing such so that everyone that still thinks the way you do finally accepts their theory has been falsified and jumps camps to THE ONE true theory. The evidence so far seems to indicate we have already achieved this scientific revolution / consensus, at least for most educational and rational experts.

If you still think otherwise, it would be great to really know what the best arguments for why one might want to think this way, and to know just how many people really do still agree with you. Evidently, so far, there are a lot more experts that disagree with you, for very convincing reasons.

Upward,

Brent Allsop

Hi Brent and thanks for the reply,
you could say that Dennett has established some well known key foundations, especially re: the categorical mistakes which define folk theories of phenomenal qualia. Put in the most respectful way i can, the represental qualia approach fundamentally misunderstands what advanced reductionists are saying. From what i can gather from your cental thesis, you are making the classic mistake which has been repeated again and again since Locke and Hobbes. Put simply your experience of qualia are the subject of study. The object of philosophy of mind(POM) is not to find out what the machine uses to represent its own processing situation. It is to describe and fully understand that the machine uses sense data computationally to create socially productive cognition, however anchored to causal detections or subseqent representations of those phsyical events.

Your theory is making two big mistakes. Firstly saying that just because referential relativism is possible,then therefore qualia is different to computer data and more than can be accounted for by materialism, is clearly false. I'll give you a good reason for why this is. Suggesting that there is something that it is like to experience qualia is a user mistake. You are utilizing subjective introspective data as a grounding data set for your theory. A cow can not be asked to study itself in the same way as a biologist can. A cow just doesn't have the perspective in order to deconstruct its perceptions and memory data. In the same way, you, as machine, has a functional component in your brain. This information processor, has characteristics which were selected by evolution because they created a bio machine with the function of self/other labelling. Once the machine ran a programme which used a representation of itself in the computation of behaviour and data organisation, the human machine could operate in social action. Just because the machine that is labelled Brent, places arbitrary subjective process values to certain recalled sense data( your thoughts, emotions, reflections and cognition), doesn't have any objective relevance to your causal and materialistic basis. You are making the mistake of say, spiritualists or humanists who utilize their own feelings and treat it as suitable data for the scientific method. It isn't and you have no theory, precisely because you are misunderstanding what hard determinism is actually saying. I must admit that most Dennet camp theorists i've had talks with, also have a poor grasp of the actual implications of simple causation. For instance they have no grasp of the fact that the human machine uses a 'belief in consciousness' element to achieve what we call awareness. Belief is a bad word as it leads people to say 'homunculus paradox etc'. I don't mean there is a believer. I am saying that the machine labels itslelf as a unit relative to that which is not the unit. This self/other construction, if you like, is the birth of social interaction and management. As you say, linguistic baggage is a genuine barrier and we often find ourselves engaged in non-arguments because we don't hold a commonality of language definitions. Despite this your theory is just a rehash of those who have misunderstood the problem before you. You repeat the words, no such thing as qualia, but please i mean this in the nicest possible way, you are missing the point totally. I know this because i have been where you are, but just like life experience, those that have lived something can tell those without it, but not vice versa. Dennet or any good determinist often fail to get over their key idea, namely that causation can be observed in all things and also in order to exist at all, anything of which you have an awareness, is physical and therefore deterministic. People who use the phenomenalist slant, in all cases without fail, miss these central facts. Your experiences of perception, however interpretted by you processor, your every memory, all composed of data from your senses. This is a major reason why so many get it wrong. Consciousness can not be observed in any form other than pure sense data. Adapted, referenced, represented or experienced by another, it is irrelevant. You, or what the machine describes as you, is nothing but process sensory derived values. There is no difference AT ALL between binary or light wave representations in the human brain. In a key way, they are just data. You seem to say that because this data can be changed, by interpretation or differental processing, that it is somehow not just sense data any more. You are trying to feel what it is like and not actually studying it at a more complex level. It is irrelevant how you feel, you are the thing we are trying to expain. We are not interested in looking for 'common sense' thoughts of a dog's understanding of other dogs. We analyse its physical system or the observable action. In the same way we most certainly don't want the human's experience of red because that claimed belief is actually part of the system itself. its phenomenalistic understanding is just another component of the machine, just a cog in itself. The belief that qualia is something different/special 'IS' the functional point. For the success of the evolved animal brain, we need you to believe that qualia is different in order to create the illusory patterns which we call self and social entity interaction.

This applies to all human qualia. It is reducible data. When Dennet says it doesn't exist, what he means is that it isn't what you think it is. Obviously he knows that the human has a belief that it is real. He isn't saying it isn't perceived at an illusory level. He IS saying that it can be reduced into purely informational components, which are most decidedly not what you described as phenomenal experience. This is the illusion of which we speak. You look at the user level, the determinist looks at what causes that combination of data handling which the machine called Brent labels as 'Brent's qualia in a mind that exists and is thinking of itself now'.

Secondly you talk of the act of effing the ineffable, which will disprove all other theories and establish rep qualia theory as the one true explanation. Experiencing the consciousness of another is totally irrelevant to whether consciousness is in fact what we think it is.

You seem to ignore the importance of deconstructing your qualia. Who's qualia, representation of that qualia, knowing what it's like to be a Brent, all these parts of your theory miss the fundemental value in deterministic accounts, which is that they don't stop at the human common sense data. Your theory reminds me for some reason of Hegel's phenomenology of spirit in that you claim to not be using the ether/humor type mistake, but then you go straight ahead and use the user illusion of phenomenal qualia. It is believe me just the same mistake. Experience is a level of description, taken from the human brain. It is useless to get an accurate understanding of the functioning of that system.

The concept is that people who dismiss reductionist accounts, never, absolutely never understand it, as it relates to the deconstruction of qualia. When you study an organism, you essentially destroy or invalidate the high level of description, in preference to a more atomistic level. Hence water is reduce to O and H . Then we get to the atomic and then the subatomic level. What your theory is doing is that it tries to say that you don't need to examine the composition of what leads to you saying'my experience of red'. Your theory stops analysing at an arbitrary level and says, qualia ia an irreducible thing which acts without cause. You might not think that you are saying that, but by saying that Dennet doesn't account for qualia, you are doing that. He moves on from the level of description. He doesn't deny it's existence to you, he just reveals it as being something you absolutely didn't see when you used a common sense view of your own introspective sensations.

No doubt we'll have many points of disagreement on this, but from what i've seen on all forum on the internet, few if any really get hard determinism when they say they do. Most are just imprisoned intellectually by various assumptions concerning how far and wide causation can deconstruct.

Many thanks and great talking to you.
cheers, Nick.

brent.allsop

posted 4/29/2010 22:22

Hi Nick,

This is great! We’ve been trying to recruit Daniel Dennett, or someone equal in intelligence that can defend this theory of consciousness for some time now. The big problem in the world today, is there aren’t enough people that really understand to allow what they are saying to stand out from what all the mistaken people are saying to each other with not enough people to help them get it right.

Would you be willing to start a camp representing this theory, or maybe assist the functionalists camp that I mentioned is just getting started with its first two supporters here:

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/37

I’m sure there are a bunch of people that understand this, and everyone else that doesn’t yet fully understand could really use your help. You could easily clean up these arguments a bit and get them ‘canonized’ so to speak in a camp, so we can find out how many other people already agree with you. I’m glad you are talking about revolutions in philosophy of mind, because by definition, such a revolution, is when people are jumping to and / or consolidating into one or more new camps. Our goal with the consciousness survey project is to rigorously measure any such process, as the right people, with the help of good arguments and new demonstrable science, convert everyone else to this best camp.

I must admit I don’t understand much of what you’re saying yet. You, working as a team with all that agree with you, could certainly help educate everyone.

I still think you are making this all too complicated, and bringing unrelated things, like determinism, self awareness, and so on into the picture. I still think all this complicated unnecessary stuff you are bringing into the picture is blinding you to the simple obvious phenomenal truth. For example, you bring in determinism and acting without cause. This has nothing to do with ineffable phenomenal qualities.

The theory predicts that you can have a simple system that is less functional, and less self aware than a simple low resolution limited color digital camera. Such a digital camera could represent a picture of a strawberry patch with ones representing the strawberries and zeroes representing the leaves. You could have a less functional phenomenal system that, instead of representing the strawberries with ones and leaves with zeros, it represents them phenomenally with red and green. The system is not self aware of the fact that it knows, phenomenally, what red and green are, and what they are phenomenally like, yet because of these phenomenal differences, it is only able to control a robotic arm that is capable of picking the strawberries.

And we are not saying that whatever it is that has these phenomenal properties cannot be further ‘reduced’. For example, it could be discovered that it is water that has a particular phenomenal property that is being used to represent 700nm light or something. And when you break this H2O down into H, and O2, do these sub elements also have ineffable phenomenal properties? Or are they lost, like the causal property of wetness is lost, when all you have is H, and O2 at a particular temperature…?

The important things are the properties, at any given level, temperature, and so on. You can always further break any of this down as far as possible, but this doesn’t change the facts of the matter of what they are phenomenally (red) and causally (wetness) like.

Forgive me for showing up late for this party. I just wanted to make a few simple comments and get some basic understanding before I join in with my own understandings.

First, Brent. In all but your last post, you have repeatedly referenced "the experts." I am curious as to what exactly qualifies an individual of being worthy of this title. For instance, on the subject of consciousness, it would seem to me that every 35 year old on the planet has the exact same number of years "field experience" with being conscious. In most fields of research and study, 35 years is a more than sufficient level of experience to qualify someone for the term "expert." It seems to me that you are confusing "expertise" with the more accurate term "notoriety," which is based primarily on an individual's ability to articulate their ideas. Usually this boils down to is a select group of people with well above average intellect, end excessive vocabularies. The problem with this, however, is that people with high IQ's and big vocabularies are typically lacking in other areas, specifically humility (forgive me for making this stereotypical, blanket statement. I am aware that there are exceptions to this). Humility is a necessary key ingredient in an unbiased and objective examination of ones own beliefs, theories, and thought processes.

Which brings me to my second observation. Ultimately, each and every person on the planet is an "expert" in their own individual "school of thought." People have a tendency to justify to themselves whatever it is they have chosen to believe, whether they are drug addicts, poets, priests, congressmen, or scientists. You will be hard pressed to find people who will easily change what they believe, even when you present them with cold, hard facts.

Third, I am not certain I fully understand the purpose of the canonization project, in general. It seems to me that the purpose is not find the correct answers, simply the ones that have the most support. Simply put, Consensus does not necessarily equal Correctness. History has proven time and time again that the majority can and will be wrong. Do not forget that the world was once flat. Most of the scientific breakthroughs and discoveries in our history have been the result of one brilliant mind standing apart from the rest (Einstein, Tesla), and sometimes they are just dumb luck (one rumor is that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was developed by accidentally leaving a petri dish on a water heater). This is not to say, of course, that the majority is always wrong, simply that we should not put too much weight on the credibility of a theory just because we have a majority.

In the end, it seems to me that popularity and majority support simply fuel the arrogance that blinds intelligent individuals from otherwise attainable realization.

Would love to hear your thoughts, and look forward to actually sharing my beliefs on consciousness.